APPENDIX A
Personal Kecollections of Auguste Comte ; by an Anony-
MOUS CONTRIBUTOR TO * ChAMBERS'S JoURNAL ' OF THE
19th of June, 1858.
As through the narrow portai the poet approaches the Elysian fields, so in seeking to give a slight sketch of one of the greatest intellects of his génération, the writer is forced to refer to circumstances of his own insignificant existence.
In 1836, when the world was still young to me, or I to it — algebraically if not otherwise identical positions — fretting under the fancied insufficiency of private tuition in England, with hard prayers I wrung from my parents permission to continue the studies preparatory to going to the university, in Paris. Hère, in each branch of the éducation sketched out for me with no sparing hand, I was consigned to the care of the first professors of the day. Long afterwards I learned with wha difficulty the lessons of one of thèse had been obtained ; but youth though I then was, I still felt, indistinctly indeed, their value. Tins tutor, whose last mathematical pupil I was, was Auguste Comte.
Daily as the clock struck eight on the horloge of the Luxembourg, while the ringing of the hammer on the bell was y et audible, the door of my room opened, and then entered a man, short, rather stout, almost what one might
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call sleek, freshly shaven, without vestige of whisker or moustache. He was invariably dressed in a suit of the most spotless black, as if going to a dinner-party ; his white neckcloth was fresh from the laundress's hands, and his hat shining like a racer's coat. He advanced to the armchair prepared for him in the centre of the writing-table, laid his hat on the left-hand corner, his snuff-box was deposited on the same side, beside the quire of paper placed in readiness for his use, and dipping the pen twice into the ink-bottle, then bringing it to within an inch of his nose, to make sure that it was properly fiUed, he broke silence : *' We hâve said that the chord .45," &c. For three-quarters of an hour he continued his démonstration, making short notes as he went on, to guide the hstener in repeating the problem alone ; then taking up another cahier which lay beside him, he went over the written répétition of the former lesson. He explained, corrected, or commented, till the clock struck nine ; then, with the little finger of the right hand, brushing from his coat and waistcoat the shower of superfluous snuff which had fallen on them, he pocketed his snuff-box, and resuming his hat he, as silently as when he came in, made his exit by the door, which I rushed to open for him. This man of few words was the Aristotle or Bacon of the nineteenth century.
Thus for a year I daily sat a listener, not always attentive, and to the last but dimly conscious of the value of lessons which I can never forget in their higher meaning, though the angles and curves which they explained hâve long since become to me more meaningless than hieroglyphics.
One would think that such a teacher, gliding in and out
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like a pièce of clock-work, without an interchange of any of the gentle courtesies of life, would raise only a répulsive feeling in his pupil. It was in vain I tried to break through the coldness of our relations, to establish that little preliminary gossip in which I hâve found some teachers too ready to employ ail the time of their lesson. He seemed to say that he had nerved himself to a disagreeable duty, and that nothing should turn him from it. Only twice did I €ven succeed in gaining proof that he had something mortal in his composition. I had been six weeks under his tuition, and still persisted, with more, perhaps, of malice than of ignorance, in using the most abominably ungrammatical French in my written répétitions of his lectures. One morning he lost patience at some solecism more excruciating than usual ; and laying down his pen, he turned to me, and said : " Why do y ou persévère in writing such barbarisms?" " You know I am a foreigner," said I; ** how should I do better ?" "• You can at least do better than this : write as you speak ;" and he resumed his pen, correcting every fault of language. From that day there were few grammatical blunders in my paper s. Once again, and this time less wilfuUy, I encountered the same mild anger. I was at the time studying very hard, generally thirteen hours a-day of book-work — a folly bitterly expiated and repented since — and I was seldom in bed till after midnight. One black wintry morning, after harder work than usual, I nodded over the lecture. With no straining of the ears could I drink in the sensé, with no forcing of the eyelids keep them open. I dared not rise and take a few turns in the room, for this would hâve been a violation of our habits. So I sat till the humming of the voice, and
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the scraping of the pen, acted like a lullaby, and I was already three parts asleep, when suddenly a change of tone aroused me, and the words, " But you sleep," recalled me to myself, only to see my tutor stalking out of the room, while I vainly tried to catch and appease him. The next day he resumed the lesson where he had left o£f on the one previous to my nap ; but not a word of reproach was uttered, or of apology allowed, by the insulted sage.
From that day I began to love him. Cold or abstracted as he seemed, the intellectual giant henceforth won almost imperceptibly on the youth. I could not feel, much less measure his greatness ; but I acquired an interest in the dry science he taught me ; and had I continued under his charge I might hâve become a mathematician. I had been taught to fear, not to révère my masters ; if I had a liking for any, it had been in proportion to his laxness ; and I now found myself half unconsciously, and quite unaccountably, gliding into a sort of affection for the most unapproachable, the most uncongenial of them ail. I was then the most unreasonable of boy-mortals. I cannot, therefore, suppose that this feeling was due to the sway of pure reason over my mind ; I can only think that it arose from an instinctive perception of the smothered kindliness which entered so largely into his composition.
I returned to England to " keep halls," and dévote myself to a new range of studies — stigmatised, I believe, by my masters and pastors as pure idleness, because not set down in their books ; and it was two years before I was again in Paris. By that time I had become acquainted with what was published of the Philosoplde positive, From its pages I had learned that my old tutor was a great man,
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though hardly yet a celebrated one. I had learned to contrast his earnestness with the laissez faire of others ; and a visit to him was one of the first pleasures which I promised myself in the capital most fertile in pleasure to youthful visitors. Mindful of the showers of snuff which had too often attacked my sternutatory muscles, I carried him a Cumnock snuff-box, with one of our Ayrshire pebbles in the lid, and was delighted to find it graciously accepted. He put it at once into a drawer of his writing- table, and then told me that he had given up the use of snuff. He said that he had withdrawn entirely from the world, to dévote himself without distraction to the poHtics of his philosophy— that he no longer even read the newspapers, and had weaned himself from every superfluity.
It was not till 1851 that I again saw him. He was then the acknowledged chief of a school, and renowned, if not admired, among ail thinkers. I had some httle trouble in finding his abode, and it was with a beating heart that I pulled the bell-string. An old gentleman in a dressinggown, with a black neckerchief strung round his throat, opened the door. I almost thought I had misunderstood the porter 's directions. '« Monsieur Comte ?" I inquiringly said.
** It is I, sir," was the answer.
The change in his appearance intimidated me, and I hesitatingly mentioned my name. At once he put out his hand, and drew me into his sitting-room. Hère I was able to remark the wonderful change which had corne over his expression since we had last met. He now reminded me of one of those mediaeval pictures which represent St. Francis wedded to Poverty. There was a mildness in
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those atteniiated features tliat might be called idéal ratlier than human ; through tlie lialf-closed eyes tliere shone the very soûl of him who liad doubted wliether lie had anytliing more than intellect. " I did not recognise you," hé said, opening a drawer ; " but I think of you almost daily. See, I still hâve your box, and I keep my seals in it, so that I am often reminded of you." He spoke unreservedly of the honourable poverty to wliich the last révolution, in depriving him of liis modest compétence, had reduced him, and he told me how the generous sacrifices of some of his disciples had relieved him of the cares of material existence.
He indulged me with a long conversation, every word of which fiUed me with fresh wonder. He was no longer the rigid thinker, regular and passionless as mechanism; he seemed to hâve renewed his youth, to hâve added something to his former self, but how or what I could not at the time imagine. In terms unintelligible to me he referred to relations which had given impulse to his affections ; he spoke with enthusiasm of the Italian poets, and of Shakspeare and Milton, whose works he had learned to read in the original ; and — 0 surprise ! — taking from his chimney-piece a well-thumbed copy of the Imitation^ he said : ** I read some pages of this book every morning."
I already had had cause to suspect that under that frigid mask which he wore in earlier years an impulsive nature and warm affections were concealed; I had heard at the time that the little keepsake I had brought had pleased him so much, that in speakûig of it a few days afterwards his eyes gMstened ; I understood, therefore, that far within him was a loving soûl; and I now learned, from a book
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which he gave me, the story of how he had found and lost the counterpart, the other half, which he had so long sought. The history of the platonic love to which he owed the late development of his affections is a strange one, and the story of its heroine one of the saddest in the history of crime.
Madame Clotilde de Vaux was the wife of a man whose misconduct had brought upon him a condemnation to the galleys for hfe. If not the original of the Maître d'Ecole in the Mysteries of Fans, his career had been too similar to the one so hideously drawn by the novelist. This lady united to youth and an unspotted réputation a poetic tempérament and literary talents of a high order. She was pining in cheerless solitude, neither wife nor widow, a state void of hope, and incapable of forgetfulness, when she met Auguste Comte, the man of austère morals and unengaging manners, but towards whom she felt the secret attraction I hâve spoken of. The acquaintance quickly ripened into a friendship, which before long became an absorbing though platonic passion. It was she wdio had opened to him the treasures of poetry ; she was the Beatrix who awoke in him the feelings of affection, and undex whose guidance he trod the idéal world of Shakspeare and Dante.
*' So greatest and most glorious things on ground May often need the help of weaker hand."
It was a friendship late found and early lost, for the lady was eut off in the prime of lier years. But lier influence did not cease with life ; lier image haunted him like a celestial vision for the remainder of lus days. In lier lie
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imagined that lie had seen humanity carried to tliat liighest perfection whicli he believed to be the end of our destiny, and he united her in his prayers with his mother and a female servant who waited on him to the last.
To one who had known Auguste Comte in former days nothing can be more striking than the terms in which he writes of ail thèse in the préface to his Positivism : his selfreproaches for his want of tenderness — he had never failed in duty — towards his mother, his unbounded vénération for his St. Clotilde, and his respect for the enlightened ignorance of his unlettered servant, afford a psychological study as curions as it is touching.
In the beginning of last September I was again in Paris. As soon as I had fixed myself in lodgings in the same studious quarter in which I had first known him, I sought out the abode of my old master. It was an autumn evening when I stumbled into the gloomy porte cocher e of his house. The porter was sitting on the sill of his lodge, Imitting a worsted stocking in the twilight. ** Is it hère that Monsieur Comte lives ? " was my question. *' Yes, sir," answered the man, without rising or Ufting his eyes from his work. " Is he at home ? '* " He was burîed tins afternoon."
I never received a greater or more unexpected shock. His tempérament and his healthy habits seemed to promise a long career ; and the last time I had talked with him he had been speaking of the employments he had marked out for his old âge, when he should be no longer capable of working at his philosophy, for he had rigorously determined the period when he should retire from what he considered his apostolate.
I shall neither défend nor critieize his system. It is a
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subject too abstruse for thèse pages, and to which I could not do justice. That it contains many truths, that it is a wonderful monument of a wonderful mind, few or none will deny, but fewer still will be found to accept his philosophy as a whole. He looks only on the positive, that is, the material side of nature ; he lias no tolérance either for spiritual weaknesses or spiritual aspirations. He is a system-maker, and in his love for his system he is unjust botli to his kind and to himself. A true child of the Kevolution, the qualities which he possesses and which he wants are equally striking ; but I do not fear to say that whatever pure morality and true conceptions abound in his Works are the genuine productions of Auguste Comte, while the childishness and pedantry which also distinguish them niay be laid at the door of the conventional Frenchman»
Note. — I hâve thought it better to reproduce the entire of this article, which, although anonymous, bears the impress of genuine observation. The last paragraph suggests two remarks. The fact, as is apparent, that the writer was not a Positivist, gives additional weight to the respect which he testifies for the personal qualities of Comte, and to his emphatic assertion of the moral élévation of Comte' s nature through the influence of Madame de Vaux. I may add, that this writer's criticisms on Positivism hâve, after the lapse of nearly a génération from Comte' s death, lost much of their force with that considérable and increasing portion of the public who, though not Positivists, respect the Religion of Humanity, and sympathize with the aims of its Founder.
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